In Today’s Journal
* When Math Is Fun… and Freeing
* Of Interest
When Math Is Fun… and Freeing
This is nothing important. I had an epiphany yesterday and thought I’d share it.
I’ve long tried to keep up with my daily fiction and nonfiction word counts (not including emails, etc.), but since December I let my Annual Production spreadsheet slide.
For whatever reason, it just doesn’t matter to me as much as it used to. Maybe because awhile back I stopped publishing a rolling tally of my numbers in TNDJ.
Or maybe the reverse is the actual truth. Maybe I stopped publishing the numbers (and keeping up with the spreadsheet) because I no longer need the motivation provided by seeing the numbers published.
Anyway, a few months ago, just out of curiosity and because it was something to do, I tallied the total word counts of my series and sagas.
Yesterday, during a break from writing the current novel, I happened across one of those tallies: The 22-volumes of the Wes Crowley saga totaled just over a million words (1,001,015).
I remember hearing some time or other a long time ago that a fiction writer doesn’t really start learning to be a good storyteller until he’s put a million words on the page.
Of course, I wrote the Crowley thing over a period of ten years with a lot of other writing in between those installments. So that caused me to wonder when I’d crossed that million-word threshold.
And of course, that made me even more curious about how many words of fiction I’ve written overall. My general assumption was that I’d written around 4 million words.
So I extended my break and tallied the 53 novels in the Blackwell Ops series: (2,065,984). Then I extended my break again and tallied the 10-volume Journey Home saga (377,466) and then the little 4-volume Nick Spalding saga (184,949).
Finally, I remembered the Stern Talbot PI mystery series. I don’t write those very often, so I don’t even think of them as being a series, but there were 9 novellas or novels: (247,858).
I was a little surprised to see that those five series/sagas alone account for 98 of my 133 novels and novellas, so almost three-quarters of my longer fiction. Of course, “novel” or “novella” isn’t a quantity. But those novels and novellas also comprise well over three million words: (3,877,272).
Frankly, I was a little stunned at that because, as I said above, I’ve long assumed my total fiction word count was somewhere around 4 million. So knowing I was close to 4 million with only my series and sagas further fueled my curiosity.
So I decided to abandon my current novel for the day and add up the rest of my novels and novellas. Those are all either one-offs or occur in pairs, with the original plus only one sequel.
- The “Other Westerns” category totaled 184,665 words.
- The “Other Action-Adventure” category totaled 271,428 words.
- The “Other SF & Fantasy” category totaled 810,294 words, and
- The “Other Mystery & Detective” category totaled 303,338 words.
I stopped short of taking the time to hunt up all of my short stories, then opening each document and adding all the totals together. Instead I grouped the numbers into a couple of intentionally low approximations.
I approximate I’ve written 310 short stories averaging around 3000 words each. So that totals another 930,000 words.
So adding that low approximation, my total fiction word count from early 2014 through December 2025 is something north of 6,376,997 words.
Whew! That’s a long way above the 4 million I’d hoped for.
Plus that doesn’t include anything I’ve written this year, and it doesn’t include all the erotica stories I’ve written (because I haven’t decided yet to publish them).
Of course I’m also only looking at fiction at the moment, so neither does that include all the nonfiction books I’ve written, much less all the posts in TNDJ and its earlier iterations.
So at that point I decided to make a leap. I’m comfortable suspecting my total cumulative word count (fiction and nonfiction) is up around nine or ten million published words.
That’s in eleven calendar years, and I took most of two of those years off. To me, that’s just freakin’ cool. (grin)
So the epiphany? Everything’s gravy now. All of the above frees me up even more to Just Write. Which in turn makes it even easier for me to trust the characters and simply let the story be what it is.
Plus from here on out, I can leave any tallies of my work to others, or to nobody at all.
Other than my age, which I can do nothing about, I’m at the perfect place (for me) as a writer: I’m still learning from Hemingway and King, and I’m still learning from teaching. I’m still improving too, but I’m also enjoying the practice even more than before.
And that just feels great! (grin)
Note: I’m so deep in the novel it’s like I’m immersed in a warm spring surrounded by fascinating scenery. Still, I’ll be back in a day or two with Jason McGinty’s post on how to find and work with an audiobook narrator. Talk with you again then.
Of Interest
How to Write Authentic Fear An awareness post, and a study in characterization. Read, absorb, and forget.
Questions About the 40K Seminar